New in mysteries

P.G. KOCH

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 28, 2006

In Boot Tracks (Europa, 206 pp. $14.95 paperback), Matthew F. Jones again sinks deep into the psyche of his main character, in this case Charlie Rankin, an edgy ex-con just released from prison, who negotiates a sleety unnamed American city on a job for "the Buddha," a lifer with apparently limitless money and connections outside. The stream-of-consciousness unspooling of events delays immediate understanding, but in time it emerges that Rankin is an amateur contract killer whose target is some guy in a country-club suburb called Willimette.

"Amateur" is the operative word here. Not only has Rankin never killed anyone, he's never shot the particular gun he's been given to use, he doesn't know the layout of the neighborhood, and he's jumpy with a kind of furious paranoia that makes the rush of relentless detail ("Tires hissing over wet pavement; the thump and squeak of windshield wipers; heat blowing loudly through the front vent; crackled voices over the short-wave radio") a kind of mental assault.

Into his fractured world, which is laced with childhood memories of beatings and rape, steps Florence, an ex-porn actress who initiates a conversation about their respective boots as they ride the bus. Rankin goes home with her and returns to her after the hit goes grotesquely wrong — again related in truly horrifying and excruciating detail. Accompanying Rankin the next day, Florence counterpoints his fraying narrative with calmly gnomic utterances, the back-and-forth slowly creating a sort of fugue state of moral unease.

All this talk transpires in a somewhat archaic-sounding vernacular, part backwoods and part Zen, that intensifies the disassociation. It's an interesting display of literary virtuosity, but maybe too much for a whole book. Far before the end, the overstretched tension becomes manipulative, even wearisome, like Beat poetry droned somewhat too long.